Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  I felt out of my depth. I went to see Mohammed, the head of department, and asked him what I could do. He said that the Red Cross issued certificates when someone was arrested, so I could ask Lika’ for proof. I asked whether Lika’ could re-submit the work and he was equivocal. I suggested I could let her do it again, but tell her that the new assignment would have a maximum mark of 30 out of 40, as an acknowledgement of the original error. He gave me permission to do this, and I told Lika’. She was reluctant (‘I want my real mark!’) but eventually relented.

  Another issue was how to monitor student attendance. I had given up taking a register early on, because of the difficulties I initially had pronouncing students’ names, and because it took so long with such a large class. But I had thus been relying on students signing their own name, which had its own risks. I decided to address this at one seminar where there was a good turnout.

  We were reading the scene with Cinna the Poet. It is a peculiar interlude, designed to release some of the tensions after long speeches from Antony and Brutus have stirred up the crowds. It is often played for laughs, although it has taken a sinister turn, including in the 1930s production by Orson Welles, in which it was used to highlight the behaviour of a mob. Cinna leaves his home, while the streets are still frenzied, and is asked a series of questions by the people he meets:

  1 Plebian:

  What is your name?

  2 Plebian:

  Where are you going?

  3 Plebian:

  Where do you dwell?

  4 Plebian:

  Are you a married man or a bachelor?

  The crowd confuses Cinna the Poet with his namesake, who was one of the conspirators; and yet, when the confusion has been revealed, they decide to kill him anyway: ‘Kill him for his bad verses!’ Noor thought that Shakespeare shared Cassius’s view of the masses. They both treat them dismissively, she said, and think crowds behave brutally. She also said she was sure that the plebian who asks Cinna if he is married ‘must be a woman.’ Qais disagreed. ‘No, this could be anyone. Like in the West Bank, you always ask someone if he is married or not, who his family is, this is just the same.’ Shakespeare may be teasing himself and his audience, I pointed out, by showing the crowd turn on a poet.

  The class had been full of humour, and I found myself surfing this wave of good feeling to address attendance. At the end I said that, if students were going to get a friend to sign their name on the register, they should make sure that the friend knew how to spell their name—and that only one friend signed (‘It really gives the game away if your name appears three times’). There was a short silence, as if they were not sure how to respond, and then everybody laughed.

  It didn’t help that I was still struggling to learn a small number of the students’ names. In Special Topics, when we came to discuss the Maxim Gorky story, ‘Twenty-six Men and a Girl’, two of the women were exceptionally sharp in the discussion, and I was ashamed that I still did not know what to call them. The story, written in 1899, is about a group of labourers making pretzels in a cellar, whose lives are occasionally enlivened by the visits of a young woman. These brief interruptions of bliss are cut short when a soldier joins the bakers. He seduces the girl, and the men turn on her.

  We worked mechanically away with our fingers and hands for hours on end, and we had grown so used to our work that we no longer even watched what we were doing. We knew each other’s faces so well that every wrinkle was familiar. There was nothing to talk about and we had become accustomed to the silence […] But silence is painful and terrifying only for those who have already said everything and who have nothing left to say; but to those who have not yet begun to talk, silence comes easily and simply.

  One of the peculiar features of the story is that the narrator uses the pronoun ‘we,’ as if speaking on behalf of all of the bakers. We speculated about what this means: that the work the bakers do is mechanical; that they do not have a life of their own; that none of them is an ‘I’; that they are ‘incarcerated.’ I pushed the students on why it says ‘to those who have not yet begun to talk, silence comes easily and simply.’ They explained why they thought the men did not speak. I kept pushing on why it says ‘not begun to talk.’

  ‘When do humans normally begin to talk?’ I asked. ‘Why is this celebrated as an event?’

  ‘It is part of becoming human,’ Lika’ said.

  I was continuing to explore the West Bank with friends I was making in Ramallah. One Saturday, a group of us went to Nabi Saleh, for a play called ‘Our Sign is the Stone’, performed by the Freedom Bus Theatre. When we set off from Ramallah, there were rumours of clashes with settlers near Nabi Saleh, but we went anyway and there was no sign of trouble. The performance was followed by a ‘playback’ session, in which the actors invited members of the audience to come and tell their story, which would then be acted out. A little girl of about seven came forward. She explained that she had encountered two soldiers in her village and told them to leave. ‘I said that I didn’t want them there because they had killed my uncle and my friend.’

  From a hilltop in Nabi Saleh, you could see a small settlement just across the valley, identifiable by its smart white houses and red roofs. (When I left the West Bank, it took me some time to adjust to the fact that small groups of houses with red roofs were not always settlements.) In the distance, we could also see construction under way on Rawabi, a ‘planned Palestinian city’ for which I had seen advertisements in Ramallah. During the journey home, Simon told me that he had been to visit Rawabi earlier that week, with some journalists. They were given the tour for those potentially interested in buying a property. About eight thousand (of forty thousand) had been sold thus far. The tour finished in a room where there were representatives of various banks, who were ready to sell mortgages. The city was aimed at upwardly mobile Palestinians, especially the American-born or aspiring elite.

  There had been some anger among Israeli settlers about Rawabi, and protests that all contractors had to sign up to say they would not use products from the settlements. But the parallels with the settlements were eerie, not only in the architecture. There were rumours that the residents of three villages were evicted, to make way for the development, and their homes demolished; there were also suggestions that Rawabi was designed to suck in residents from Area C, which was under Israeli control, opening the way for it to be annexed. I did not know which of these rumours to believe. It is one function of living in the West Bank that one starts to see no clear distinction between conspiracy theories and likely explanations.

  One weekend, I went with Simon and some other friends to Al-Walaja, a town near Bethlehem that is closed in by settlements on three sides, and which will ultimately be surrounded entirely by the Wall. For now, the work is incomplete. We drove to a road that encircles the town and we could see the edge of the Wall, and we each stood with a foot on either side of it. We also found a yellow metal door in the Wall, at the top of a hill. We prised it open and could see the sky on the other side. It was like the end of The Truman Show, when Truman escapes from the enclosed television studio he was made to believe was the world: a sudden encounter with the edge of reality.

  When we left, we came across a gate, blocking the road Simon had planned to take. I looked it up that evening on the Activestills.org website that evening, where there was this explanation:

  A military gate [was] placed in front of Omar Hajajlah’s home on the road leading from Al Walaja village to [the monastery and vineyard at] Cremisan […] Omar’s home will be left on the ‘other side’ of the Separation Wall [when it is completed] and will be connected to the village through a tunnel. The family will be completely surrounded by a fence.

  We diverted onto a road just above the gate, which was empty and silent. Huge mounds of barbed wire bordered it, and in places the road seemed unfinished: there were little mounds of plastic tubing sticking up out of concrete. There were signs, giving the speed limit and a warning of a sharp bend, but ult
imately the road came to an abrupt stop, petering out into a track and then into farmland. We speculated that it must have been used to start building the Wall, and might be a military run-off road. We turned back and bounced down a track to a nearby checkpoint.

  On the way home, Simon stopped the car at the entrance to Beit El, the Israeli settlement nearest to Ramallah. He wanted to show us a sign he had seen there:

  The People of Israel have returned to their rightful place, the site where God promised this Land to our forefathers. Welcome to Beit El.

  At around this time, there was a graduation party for the students in the English Department, held in a plush building in a nearby town. I had not realised the event was taking place, so I sheepishly stood in line with the other well-dressed members of staff, wearing a Batman t-shirt. The students were presented with certificates, even though they had not taken their final exams. I pulled Lynn aside, and she laughed. ‘The first time I came, I looked along the line and thought: that one failed, and that one failed….’ The party seemed to be a student tradition, and it was always held a couple of months before the graduation ceremony itself.

  Wafa gave a short speech in English. She said at the start that most of the friends and family in the audience would not understand it. Then the students put on a play called ‘Student Suffering’, in which one of them acted out an ordinary day at Al-Quds. It began with him being stopped and searched by an Israeli soldier and ended with an altercation with the head of department—effectively mimicked, with his trousers pulled up high above his waistline—who told the student he had failed.

  As I was leaving with a group of other staff, I saw Qais and Haytham skulking at the back of the room. They were older than many of the students who had been on stage, but they both had a small number of modules still to complete. Qais had been at the university, on and off, for seven years and Haytham for five years. There were various reasons why it had taken them so long. I wondered if, for all their complaints about the place, it might be attractive to stay at university, where young men and women were allowed to mix quite easily. They could thus postpone entry into an adult world that might quickly impose the demands of family life and in which there was a limited range of jobs.

  Although I had started to feel as though I knew them well, my knowledge of the students was all from the classroom. I had trouble picturing how their lives would actually be beyond it. Many of the English students would become teachers. Abd already had a job at Rawabi. A couple of students worked part-time in call centres, and others worked in a family business, such as a shop or hotel.

  Another strike was called towards the end of April, as we were not paid again in March. I feared it was possible the semester would be abandoned, or that it would resume after I had to leave. I was told that such persistent financial problems were unusual at the university. Yet I could also see that the students were familiar with this kind of disruption. They were used to the occupation playing havoc with their lives, one way or another.

  When we finally got back to class, I gave the students another of the Walid Khazendar poems that Tom Paulin had translated. I had found ‘The Thin Hem’ more difficult to understand. It ends:

  —if he arrives

  he’ll split the air

  like the flame on a welder’s torch

  but he doesn’t he can’t

  —now all I want

  is to find a fire and pour oil

  right back on its flames

  The poem is about a woman praying for the return of a man, a ‘loved one who isn’t here.’

  I was walking back from the café over the road from campus one lunchtime, when I saw Lika’. She had looked upset in Special Topics and I asked her what was wrong. She said that she had been told she might fail her minor discipline and thus have to come back next year. She gave me a copy of the certificate about her brother’s arrest, and then asked if I would like to see a picture of him. We walked into the entrance of the building. Hanging from the ceiling was a poster, bearing photos of five men of varying ages, all from the local area. Lika’ told me they were all from a political movement, a small one which I had not heard of before. Her brother was 22, a year older than her, and they looked alike, each with a thin nose, so their eyes sat close together with a peculiar intensity. She said he was in Ofer prison and that they had not been allowed to see him. The date of his trial had been delayed several times.

  The certificate she gave me read:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  This attestation is valid only if the English and Arabic parts match each other.

  According to the information received from the Israeli Authorities, the International Committee of the Red Cross attests that:

  Mr […….]

  From NABLUS [ID no.]

  Was arrested by the Israeli authorities on 18.04.2013

  He is to date: Awaiting trial

  Length of sentence/administrative period:

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  He/She was released on: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  12

  My country’s friend

  The soldier asked me where I was from.

  ‘London,’ I said, showing him my passport.

  The man standing next to him, who was a settler, interjected: ‘Are you a football fan?’ He was plump and was wearing a slim-fitting white shirt. He had been talking loudly to the soldiers and gesticulating, as we approached.

  ‘Fulham,’ I said, feeling myself take shallow gulps of air.

  The settler laughed and told me that his friends in London all supported Spurs.

  One of the soldiers had turned to Khalid, who had produced his wallet.

  ‘You know what, I’m really sorry, but all I have on me is my university card,’ he said.

  He showed them a small Leeds University library card with his picture on it.

  ‘Are you a Leeds United fan?’ asked the settler.

  Khalid nodded.

  When we had left the Ibrahimi Mosque, we had made a decision without speaking. I gave Khalid my camera, which he hung around his neck, so that he looked like a tourist. At the bottom of the street below the mosque, there were two soldiers standing behind a small temporary fence. We walked alongside the fence and up to the corner, where this road met Shuhada Street, which is where the soldiers stopped us.

  Hebron, which is known as Al-Khalil in Arabic, is a large city, which stretches out into villages and farmland. From the servees, Khalid pointed out the village his family is from. Later, we passed farmland to the right of the road and, to the left, a refugee camp, encased in wire. This section of farmland seemed scarred, empty other than the stumps of trees on the perimeter, which had been cut down to ensure the security of an Israeli settlement beyond them.

  The city is predominantly Palestinian, but there is a small Israeli settlement in the centre, so it is divided into different areas of control. The most contentious point in the city is the mosque, which adjoins a synagogue, and which in the Jewish faith is known as the Cave of the Patriarchs.

  We had got to the mosque through narrow streets that were mostly deserted. We passed a clothes stall, where untidy piles of children’s wear were stacked on a wall and hung on coat hangers behind it, flat against a wire fence. Behind the fence was a clump of barbed wire, which stood in front of a concrete wall. Just peeking out above it was a balcony and the upper windows of a building, which were part of an Israeli street. Further on, there was a wire fence covering the street above us. The market lies directly beneath Israeli settlements and the wire above was littered with empty bottles, plastic packages, coat hangers and sweet wrappers thrown by the settlers towards the Palestinian street below. The stalls were a mixture of clothes for locals and trinkets for tourists. But the stall-keepers’ attempts to attract my attention were half-hearted. Khalid explained that many of the shopkeepers opened up as a gesture of defiance, not in the expectation that they could make much money.

  On the other side of the mosque is Shuhada Street,
once the central marketplace in town, which has been closed to Palestinians since a massacre at the mosque in 1994. Khalid told me that he remembered visiting the street when he was a child. ‘Hebron is the first place I heard gunfire. There were all these people running towards us. I asked my Dad if we were going to be killed.’

  After the soldiers had let us through, Khalid kept hold of my camera as we made our way down Shuhada Street, so the pictures I have from our walk are his. The first two were taken when we had walked about a hundred yards and then turned back to look at the street. There were about a dozen one-storey shops on either side, their beige metal shutters closed. Almost the only relic of activity was a ladder, which stood about halfway down on the right, its feet resting against the pavement and its top leaning against the roof. The wide expanse of the road was empty. For the second picture, Khalid zoomed in on the very end of the street, where it curves off to the right. The soldiers had disappeared from view, but Khalid had glimpsed the young settler we had encountered, still standing on the edge of the pavement, his skullcap visible at the back of his head and his white shirt spilling untidily over his trousers.

  The next picture showed a sign for tourists, which read: ‘These stores were closed by the IDF for security reasons after Arabs began the “Oslo War” (aka The Second Intifada) in September 2000, attacking, wounding and murdering Jews on this road.’ Another sign read: ‘These buildings were constructed on land purchased by the Hebron Jewish community in 1807. This land was stolen by Arabs following the murder of 67 Hebron Jews in 1929. We demand justice! Return our property to us!’

  The streets were mostly deserted, but we passed a clutch of soldiers, and then a small group of children. There was an older girl holding hands with a younger one, and several boys throwing water balloons. One of the photographs shows a boy of about twelve gliding down the slight hill on his skateboard. The next one is of another row of closed shops, each with a green metal hood. There was faded Arabic writing on the first shop and Khalid explained that it had been a pet shop. Two Israeli flags hung from a lamppost outside.